


I Am Not A Stranger To The Dark

by icewhisper



Series: Leonard Snart Shorts [12]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-04 21:35:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13373508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: They destroyed the Spear. They returned Merlyn to his time. All they had left was Dhark and Snart. Then, Dhark broke the brainwashing he’d had over Len.





	I Am Not A Stranger To The Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Written as part of my writing blog, [leonardsnartwrites](https://leonardsnartwrites.tumblr.com/). Normally, it would have been posted under the collections fic, [Leonard Snart Shorts](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10837056), but it ended up longer than planned.
> 
> Anonymous prompt: Mick uses his knowledge as Chronos to help Len recover from his Legion brainwashing, all the hurt/comfort on both sides pls!

He wasn’t sure what happened. One second, he was sniping at Mick, angry and bitter, while he stared at him through the glass wall of the cell he’d been put into. The next, everything seemed to break. His knees crashed into the floor. Mick shouted. He thought he might have been screaming himself, but it was also entirely possible that he’d just gone eerily silent. His brain was buzzing, a white noise that matched the sudden numbness that started in his head and went all the way down to his toes.

Mick’s hands grabbed at his shoulders and he met his eyes, shaken.

“What happened?” he choked out. “Where am I?”

Horror washed over Mick in a way Leonard hadn’t seen since they were fifteen and he’d muttered that he deserved the beatings his father laid on him. Thirty years later, the look didn’t instill any comfort in Len. He grasped at Mick’s wrist.

“Mick…”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” his partner asked, shaken and scared and Leonard knew it couldn’t be good. Whatever was happening…

He spouted off a date that made Mick go gray. “I was going to call you,” he pressed on and looked at Mick in what he hoped conveyed apology. “I had something for you.”

He thought of the gun—a damn _flamethrower_ —that was probably any sane person’s idea of a horrible gift to give a diagnosed pyromaniac. They hadn’t spoken in two years, because Mick had damn near burned himself alive and giving him better access to the flame…

Leonard’s sense of self-preservation had never been a good one.

Especially when it came to Mick.

“What the fuck did you do to him?” Mick snapped at the light-haired man watching them from another cell. He was in a cell, he realized a little late. Not prison and _definitely_ not Central City, but a cell nonetheless. One Mick had freedom to enter in and out of, but he didn’t. He was a prisoner. Mick wasn’t.

Mick was…different.

He barely heard the other man rambling on about magic and brainwashing and _it was the only way to shut him up_. He wondered if he should be insulted or if he should be calling his shrink and begging for a whole new host of anti-psychotics. It might have been the latter, but Mick hauled him up and led him through something that looked like a supped up Serenity. The med bay was decidedly more impressive than the one on Firefly—the AI was a nice touch—but there were people he didn’t recognize lingering in the doorway was a blue light washed over him.

A blonde girl—pretty, but young—stepped forward. “He’s supposed to be in the cells.”

“Dhark brainwashed him,” Mick told her, but his eyes stayed focused on their back-and-forth between Len and the screens to his right. “Broke it when they were down in the brig.”

The fact that Mick was even saying the word brig with a straight face was enough to make Leonard seriously consider a psychotic break. His old shrink used to say it might happen eventually, that his brain wouldn’t be able to handle everything he seemed to take in and he might just break. Mick had always called her a quack. Now, Len wasn’t so sure.

“He looks fine-”

Except, the AI—he’d have to get her name later—cut the blonde off with an English accent and a matter-of-fact declaration that he wasn’t fine. Magical brainwashing left more damage than the type Mick went through, she explained in a clinical tone that Len would have just accepted if some mysterious voice hadn’t just said Mick had been brainwashed.

“The hell is that thing talking about?” he snapped as Mick looked back at him. “Mick?”

“Not important,” his partner told him, which it really fucking _was_ , so that was something Leonard had exactly zero plans in dropping. Mick took his hand—there were _people watching_ —and gave it a squeeze. “Later, Len.”

He glared at him hotly, but bit his tongue. He drew his hand back and crossed it over his chest. “Out,” he told the others. The blonde looked a little shaken and the others in the doorway were staring at him like he was some kind of sideshow freak. He directed an extra glare towards them too.

“We need to take him back,” the blonde told Mick as she moved towards the door, but it sounded like a warning. “You can’t-”

“The timeline split,” the AI reported, as if that made any sense at all. “There’s already another version of Mr. Snart in 2014.”

A tall guy gaped. “How?”

“Time wants to happen,” Mick muttered under his breath. That made about as much sense as a timeline splitting, but Mick’s words carried a weight the AI’s didn’t. Len wasn’t sure he liked it.

He _definitely_ didn’t like it after he and Mick were left alone and he’d gotten the whole story. Time travelling and manipulation and him dying in some heroic blaze of stupid. He’d died to save Mick—something he’d always kind of expected—but blowing himself up was more Mick’s shtick than Len’s.

Nausea twisted his stomach to pieces when Mick talked about Len leaving him behind and the hell that came after. Chronos—he couldn’t even find any enjoyment in the unoriginal name—and the hell Mick was still going through. He could see the pain like a film over his eyes, similar and different to the way it had been after his family died, but it shook Len to the core all the same.

“I left you to that,” he repeated, but he didn’t apologize. It was a different him, pushed through different experiences or that stupid Oculus that had been fucking with their lives for God knows how long. Apologizing wouldn’t have changed it, anyway. It was done, scars laid on top of scars and new nightmares to add to the pile.

In the privacy of the med bay, he reached out for Mick’s hand on his own and tugged him close. It wasn’t a hug, but Mick dipped his head forward until his forehead touched Len’s. They both gave a heavy sigh.

Mick said he was okay, but Leonard knew it was a lie.

Len said he was fine, but Mick could feel Len trembling under his hands.

Neither of them slept that night. Neither of them slept for weeks, torn up in old memories and scattered snatches of ones that Len was recovering.

The one night they managed to sleep a couple hours, Leonard woke up screaming. He muttered a disjointed story about ice and killing Mick and it didn’t make sense, because Len would kill himself before he’d ever shoot ice through his partner’s back.

“It wasn’t you,” Mick muttered, lips against the side of Len’s head. “It wasn’t even me.”

It was. It was another version, but it was a Mick that had been alive and breathing until Len put an end to that.

“I killed you on another timeline,” Mick confessed in the quiet of the room one night. “The Time Masters… They wanted me to know what it felt like.” He didn’t say how he did it, but he held Len a little too tightly before his own self-disgust made him retreat. Len followed after him.

“We’re even,” he told him. It was twisted and would make either one of their shrinks start ranting about unhealthy relationships and fucked up coping mechanisms, but it didn’t change the facts. They’d killed each other; an aberration and a version living in a timeline that was dying. Neither version would have lived much longer, anyway.

“I don’t think I can be here anymore,” Mick admitted, laced with a guilt that Len wasn’t sure those other people deserved.

Len took him home, leaving the Waverider behind with harsh words and reminders that they’d both died for these people. They’d both lost their minds for these people.

No one tried to make them stay.

The End


End file.
